Our elected officials shoulder much of the blame for California’s homegrown housing problem

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Construction continues at the Park Place community being built in southern Ontario Wednesday June 21, 2107. The demand for single-family homes in the Inland Empire has fueled the strongest building activity in nearly a decade, according to a new report from the UC Riverside School of Business Center for Economic Forecasting and Development. Single-family home construction in the region hit its highest level (for a quarter) in 9 years, at 2,182 units, in the first quarter. This represents the greatest number of units built since the first quarter of 2008 when 2,242 units were constructed, according to the report. (Will Lester-SCNG/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin)

We see the headlines daily — California has an affordability problem when it comes to housing. People have to live further and further away from their jobs, and even a median-priced condo is out of reach for many. Since this affects so many of us, and since California now has about a fourth of the nation’s homeless population, compassionate people want to do something. But that something could make a bad situation even worse. As former U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, says, “the best way to make something expensive is for government to make it affordable.”

After emigrating from Jamaica as a child and settling in Florida, I came to California as soon as I could. Our amazing state — with its lack of humidity and flying bugs — has always been attractive to aspiring actors, creators and entrepreneurs, so a higher cost of living was expected as a down payment on living the California Dream. What’s happening now, however, is causing sleepless nights for many.

First, we need to understand how we ended up with this problem. California has lots of people willing to build, so how did we not keep up with the clear demand for so long? For years, the state has consistently added about half the housing needed to keep pace with the population. Our elected officials shoulder much of the blame, by constraining supply due to mandates and regulations. Now, of course, they’d like to be part of the solution. Central planning, however, has never worked, even though it’s been tried in myriad ways and in many different variations.

The first hurdle that politicians enacted was the California Environmental Quality Act. Instead of being used to address real environmental concerns and protect our unique topography, it’s often used as a cudgel to enact wage and other concessions from developers. Over a third of the lawsuits filed under CEQA have to do with housing. This, of course, adds costs and delays to development, and gives pause to anyone considering building in the state.

The environment and our desire to protect it has led to another barrier to maintaining an adequate supply of housing as well, even though the case can be made that our “extreme green” policies make life even more unaffordable for our poorest citizens. Vehicle miles traveled has been added as a consideration of environmental impact, which is why so much new development is now in single-family home neighborhoods that are balking at their new, high-density project proposals. Many people who settled in California specifically chose not to live in places like Manhattan, and like the freedom and open spaces their cars and backyards give them, even as districts around the state put us on road diets and pitch neighborhood transit plans.

Due to the insatiable appetite for tax revenue to stem the looming tide of unfunded pension liabilities, many municipalities have found an easy source of funds in developer fees. The impact fees that builders pay before they ever turn over a shovel of dirt are the highest in the nation.

What, then, can we do to increase the supply of housing to come close to matching the demand?

Thomas Inman, restating a principle of the Hippocratic School, said: “Practice two things in your dealings with disease: either help or do not harm the patient.” Elected officials should take heed. Instead, this year alone, they’re looking to add more straws to the camel’s back. In May, the California Energy Commission approved a policy mandating solar panels be put on all new housing, again adding to California’s already highest-in-nation materials, labor and regulatory building costs.

And now, Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian has proposed Assembly Bill 1857, a bill that “would change the goal of California’s structural safety codes from one that provides ‘emergency egress’ to one that provides ‘functional recovery’” at a yet-to-be-determined cost. In a press release touting the proposed legislation, Mr. Nazarian said “We are already dealing with a severe housing crisis across California. It’s just common sense to make new buildings stronger and safer.” It’s also common sense to note that this new mandate would make housing even more unaffordable than it already is, and that the seismic standards in the state already focus on saving lives in an earthquake.

These are but two examples of the ever-growing requirements placed on construction.

We need to remove the obstacles for developers who would like to build — and yes, to make a profit when they do. They are building units based on math that must add up. When people propose a certain number of “affordable” units be part of a development, it just increases the cost of the “unaffordable” ones. Decreasing impact fees, eliminating or reducing the ability of groups to use CEQA as a form of extortion and stopping the ever-increasing number of mandates on housing construction would go a long way toward increasing supply, and thus, slowing the rise in costs.